Overview
- The National Hurricane Center, which announced the update Tuesday, will fold tropical storm and hurricane watches and warnings for inland areas into the standard five-day cone for the continental U.S., Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a simpler single-shade look and new legend symbols.
- Hawaii will get probability-based storm surge watches and warnings plus a peak surge graphic that forecast likely water levels up to 72 hours before impacts.
- An experimental cone using ellipses will appear on Hurricanes.gov during advisories to show 90% of plausible track paths, about 23% wider than today’s cone, with the agency warning of possible timing glitches during testing.
- Based on recent forecast error trends, the operational cone will be modestly narrower in 2026, with local outlets reporting roughly 4–8% shrinkage in the Atlantic and 3–8% in the Pacific.
- The seven-day tropical outlook will mark systems with near-zero development odds with a gray X, and the NHC stresses the cone tracks the storm’s center only so damaging rain, surge, and tornadoes can still hit outside it.